The Material History of a Nitrate Film, Part 1: Exhibition - Text 4
All in all, our film came to exist in six negatives (A–F) and sixty-five prints, five of which were made on 16mm stock. The scenario described above may look excessively complex; in fact, it is the oversimplified mirror of a very plausible reality. Many silent films were subject to a much larger number of duplications, and in most cases there is no way to determine how many prints were made at any given step of the process, nor can we reconstruct its actual chronology.
An unspoken rule of film preservation is that the chances of finding a nitrate copy of a silent film in good shape are inversely proportional to its commercial success: the more the film was projected, the worse its prints are bound to appear, unless the negative still exists, in which case it all depends on whether or not it has been properly handled in previous times.
Two preliminary observations can be drawn from the hypothetical saga outlined so far. Should we be holding a 35mm copy of A Trip to the Moon in our hands, we could now begin to appreciate that its position in the genealogical tree of the film’s duplication history does matter, because it explains why the print is in black and white, and not in colour; why its title card appears different from those of other prints; why it is complete or not. As for our imaginary film, watching it as a 1948 print (number 52) would have told us very little of how copy number 4 appeared in 1914, given the many previous steps undertaken to generate projection copies from the negatives, and the duplicate negatives from projection copies made at a later time.
Duplication: a lossy process
Each of these steps (the making of a negative and the subsequent creation of one or more prints) corresponds to a print ‘generation’. In each duplication cycle with a photographic process, some percentage of the visual information in the previous copy – a smaller or greater amount, depending on the quality of laboratory work – is lost for ever (modern film technology can only reduce the gap without eliminating it altogether). Think, for instance, of a projection copy derived from a tenth-generation negative: the cumulative effect of the previous nine generations in the latest reproduction cycle should give a rough idea of the disparity between the film’s appearance on the screen and the look of a print made from the original camera negative.
